New Year’s Eve
Stories are universal. Everyone has at least one, and some have a great many, indeed. There have been stories for as long as there have been people to need them, and perhaps a little bit longer. And wherever you go, whatever language you speak, some things stay the same. Every culture has its heroes, paragons of whatever they call virtue, legendary and awe-inspiring. Every culture has its tragedies. Every culture has its jokes.
But every culture has its villains, too. Anywhere you go, you will find them. There have been villains, been nightmares and horrors and evildoers, for as long as there have been heroes to need them, and perhaps a little bit longer. There are countless kinds, in epics and tragedies and jokes alike.
And of all these stories, all the narratives people weave to make events into meaning, there are perhaps none that are held quite as deeply inside a person as the scary ones. There have always been stories to tell around the campfire, when the night presses in close around you and there are monsters in every shadow. There have always been monsters to tell those stories about, and not all of them were the people sitting beside you.
But monsters need stories, too. And so when these beings sit around campfires of their own, witches and werewolves and bogeymen huddled close while whatever they call darkness presses in close around them, they have scary stories of their own. Even their blood feels a chill when some things are mentioned, when some stories are told. The Courts of the Sidhe feature in a great many, and the Sidhe are deadly in combat. But they are at their most dangerous in subtler arenas. Many of the dark and terrible stories about the Courts begin at a festival or celebration, a masquerade ball or sleazy party.
They will never, ever lie to you. But they are among the finest deceivers in the whole of creation, and terribly dangerous to deal with. They say that if you ever think you’ve gotten the better of the Sidhe in a bargain, you should immediately start counting fingers, then toes, then friends and relatives. This is only half a joke, but it often won’t help. The reason it seems like a good deal is that you haven’t seen the price tag. The Courts play the long game, and they play it very well indeed. They play for keeps.
And even setting that aside, it’s never safe. The Sidhe are not like mortals, do not think like them however much they might look like them. Another common saying is that the hardest part of deciding whether the fae’s blessings are worse than their curses is telling the two apart, and this one isn’t even half a joke. Sometimes, it’s not the wicked fae who do indescribable harm. Sometimes the celebration is sincere, and the celebrants are still left broken.
At one such celebration, two women make one false step, and leave the hall with four armed guards as their escort. For them, it’s time to go. To return home and lick wounds, no less serious for being intangible, the inevitable consequence of exposure to such beauty. To start thinking about prices, and counting their treasures. For them, the party is over.
But they are just two partygoers among many, and not such important ones that the party is over for their absence. In their wake, there’s a brief stir of conversation about the scandal, but it burns itself out quickly, and as the ripples fade, the dance resumes.
The music never ceases, particularly at the dance floor. The musicians are as impossibly skilled as the dancers, using a bewildering variety of instruments, and they rotate through a similarly broad range of styles.
A virtuosa with a violin made of glass and strung with starlight plays a reel that pushes the dancers to ever faster speeds, until limbs are a blur and the sound of footsteps fades out into a constant, ceaseless roar. Then, without any warning, she pivots to a lament so thick with pathos that it’s physically painful to hear, tugging mercilessly at the heartstrings. Many of the Sidhe have tears streaming down their faces to the floor, inconsolable even as they continue to dance.
A hundred and one drummers wearing ornately carved demonic masks hammer at their instruments with heavy mallets of living wood, pounding out a demanding rhythm. They recite a marching song in a dialect of Irish not heard in Ireland in a thousand years as they go, voices calling out in eerily-perfect unison.
A chorus of Midnight fae, each one wearing heavy black robes with cowls that cast their faces into shadow, sing an a capella dirge in haunting, ethereal voices. Each of them is carrying a simple, pale candle in front of them, burning with cold blue flames that seem to consume light rather than give it forth.
A tall, male Sidhe with three heads sings in harmony with himselves, while playing a hurdy-gurdy that sounds more than a little like windchimes. Each of his faces has a different color of beard, all of them long enough to brush against the floor. He sings three songs before his heads start arguing with each other about what to sing next, and he retires to the corner of the room to wait for them to sort it out amongst themselves.
The whole time, the dancers never stop.
A living storm cloud rolls past overhead. It casts that corner of the room momentarily into shadow, lit only by the inconsistent flickering of lightning crawling across the cloud’s underbelly.
Underneath, two humans wearing silver collars set with gemstones look up, momentarily confused. One mumbles something under her breath in Romanian. A moment later, with a tiny thunderclap, the cloud starts raining.
The two humans aren’t the only people looking up, at that point. Several satyrs and dryads do as well, all with their mouths open. The rain, it quickly becomes apparent, isn’t water, but rather a white wine so light and sweet it seems impossible.
The male human’s eyes roll back in his head. A moment later, a Sidhe woman with raven’s-wing hair and teeth like shards of stained glass seizes him by the hair, and kisses the wine out of his mouth. His face is covered in blood when she breaks the kiss off, and he looks almost deliriously happy, even when the wine falling in his fresh cuts prompts a scream.
An impossibly beautiful woman wearing a gown made of fire dances. Next to her, a young-looking man with centuries’ accumulated shadows in his eyes stumbles. It’s barely even perceptible, just the tiniest imperfection, out of place by the width of three whiskers.
It’s enough, though. Packed in as tight as the Sidhe dancers are, moving at full speed with only the tiniest margins of error, it’s enough. He crosses her path, and that gown doesn’t just look like fire made material. It burns hot enough to melt steel. The heat is contained unnaturally well, not radiating even a hair’s breadth from the flames themselves, but her magic does nothing to protect someone who actually comes into contact with the fire.
He falls away, screaming. His arm and hand, where he actually brushed against her gown, are a charred ruin, but the fire doesn’t spread. No one raises a finger to help him as he screams, and she dances across his fallen body with a cruel smile, the stiletto heels she wears leaving small, bleeding holes in her wake.
Satyrs wearing livery that looks more like mist than cloth stand duty at a bar made of clouds, a hundred feet long if it’s an inch. They pour cup after cup from pitchers that never empty, and never seem to pour quite the same drink twice. Wine as black as ink that smells of chocolate and peppers, mead so sweet it conjures halcyon images of summer evenings as intoxicating as the drink itself, brandy distilled from berries that have no names and taste exactly like your own instead…the variety is endless.
Cup after cup after cup after cup. Their motion never ceases.
A man with eyes like hollow pits in his head, with embers somewhere in the depths, clearly wasn’t ready for how strong the wine really is. He tosses back a cup the size of his head, then coughs, abruptly staggering to the side. Another man, this one with inhumanly beautiful features and eyes like sapphires with feline slit pupils, expresses concern, but it almost immediately fades into cruel mockery.
Eventually, the Sidhe with eyes like a cat actually trips the drunk man, who seems so disoriented that he might well have fallen regardless. All the same, a sudden growl from the floor announces that the japes have gone far enough. A cú sìth the size of a young lion, lying on the floor under the bar, raises his head from the floor and glares at the offending Sidhe, who raises a hand in apology and backs away.
Mollified, the cú sìth makes a soft chuffing noise, then turns and mounts another of the faerie hounds under the bar, as heedless of who might be watching as if the pair were the mortal dogs they somewhat resemble. A satyr, with an indulgent smile, pours a bowl full of wine, and sets it on the floor within reach of the two hounds.
A cyclops, three ogres, and two werewolves all sit at the bar together, exchanging recipes and other culinary tips. After a while they’re joined by a pair of faeries shaped like humanoid leopards and a dryad with a strong resemblance to a sundew, with a wide variety of other voices joining in more sporadically before wandering off to do other things.
Basically everyone involved is drunk, and they obviously don’t realize quite how loud they’re being about their conversation. This isn’t unexpected, and the whole thing would be barely noticeable, except for the details about exactly what kinds of culinary tips are being exchanged. This whole crowd, though, is talking about cooking and eating people.
They’re not especially subtle about it, either. The cyclops complains about how would-be heroes are always so musclebound, and it makes them too tough. One of the faeries nods knowingly, and says that this is exactly why she prefers to eat virgin sacrifices. The dryad just smirks, but it’s not a very fair comparison. As one of the werewolves points out, she has the luxury of exuding meat tenderizer from her pores.
A man with his face covered in intricate black-and-white paint walks up to someone at the buffet. With a solemn expression, and no sign of humor at all, he collects a cream pie from the table, cocks his arm, and flings it into her face.
Upon making contact, it explodes into hundreds of tiny, cream-colored butterflies, which coalesce into a cloud and hang around the woman’s head and shoulders like a halo. She places the empty pie crust upon the man’s head like a crown, solemn as a funeral.
Seventeen people, close enough to see this playing out clearly, suddenly break into song, in perfect unison. They’re singing in a dialect obscure even among the fae, with a bare handful of words in common with even the most archaic dialects of Welsh. Most of these singers look disturbed or even horrified, strongly suggesting they don’t even know the language their own mouths are now compelled to shape, but the chorus remains unnaturally well coordinated, with nary a syllable out of place.
The two primary actors of the drama ignore them completely. The man kneels, pie crust resting on his head, tears streaming down his painted face. He looks at the floor, and then melts away into the shadows without a trace. The female looks at the stone where he just knelt for several more moments, butterflies still hanging in the air around her like a living halo, expression unreadable. Then she turns and walks away.
At no point does either one explain any part of what just happened to the bystanders, who continue singing for another six minutes before abruptly falling silent.
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